Oh dear – Looks like Education Queensland is in a pickle over the latest incidents involving their Government-handed-out Laptop per student scheme. The Courier Mail exposed the issue, in this article, that some laptops come equipped with a “security” screenshot program, that will regularly take screenshots of the laptop’s desktop, including Skype windows, web browsers, and other things.

Quoting the article:

One mother has provided proof her daughter’s high school-issued laptop stored timed snapshots of movies watched on the computer, the background screensaver and claims that even a Skype screenshot was stored.

Most parents are aware that elements of their child’s computer use are recorded but the extent of the monitoring by the AB Tutor Client Program has sparked privacy concerns.

And, additionally:

More than 70,000 computers have been issued to high school students across the state but Education Queensland was yesterday unable to say how many had additional monitoring software installed.

Queensland Council for Civil Liberties president Michael Cope said the complaint – if true – was a “violation of privacy”.

While laptop usage tracking is a concern, this level of tracking falls into the category of “Big Brother”. Education Queensland claims that a screenshot is only taken if you type profanity (checked by a local copy of a maintained list) into certain apps. However, you wouldn’t want people taking screenshots of your Windows Live Messenger conversation or Skype webcam session, would you?

For the full scoop, hit the articles’ source links. Ultimately, if one is concerned about the software and wants a solution-to-end-all-solutions, just nuke the laptop with the good ‘ol format utility (booting from a USB or disc, of course) – which will erase the government’s installed copy of Windows, allowing one to replace it with their own copy of Windows.

Article Source: Courier Mail Articles (1, 2).

Thanks to a user on my Steam profile, I’ve got a few little tricks to share with you in case you’re playing Black Ops and need a bit of a performance boost.

Disable Depth of Field and Anti-aliasing
These two things kill performance. The former tries to make it seem more realistic by “zooming” out distant parts of the level so it feels more realistic. The latter smooths off any rough edges on objects, which means more stress for your GPU to handle.

Simply turn off these options in Settings -> Video. You will get a noticeable responsiveness boost. If you’re still jittery, then lower the texture quality to ‘Low’ or ‘Medium’, model detail to ‘Low’ or ‘Medium’ and turn ‘Specular map’ off.

Enable the Lagometer
The lagometer is a cool little graph that shows how derpy (read: laggy) your internet connection is. Blue means it’s all good, but when it goes yellow and starts climbing, then it means it’s getting not-so-crash-hot. This feature only works in multiplayer. The bottom half of the graph is how long it’s taking to render what you see onscreen. If it goes red, then you’re losing frames and that’s no good (you get choppy gameplay).

At the Black Ops Multiplayer Main menu, press the tilde (~) key to open a console, and enter: drawLagometer 1. Press enter to run the command. Then, enter a session, and above your ammo should be a little graph. The dashed line is the “limit”.

Enable a FPS Meter
At the Black Ops Multiplayer Main menu, press the tilde (~) key to open a console, and enter: drawFPS Simple. Press enter to save that setting. Now, enter a session, and to your top right, you should see something that says “30 FPS (63 cg ms/frame)” or something to that extent. This just lets you know how well/awful your GPU is getting treated by the game. If the game is lagging, then the numbers will change to a dark red.

Advanced Tweaks
Make sure CoD Black Ops is shut down first before doing these tweaks.

In your Steamapps folder, located at C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps for x86 Windows, or for x64 Windows, this will be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps. Under that folder should be a folder called “call of duty black ops”. Look for a file in that folder called “config_mp.cfg”. Open this file in Wordpad. Find and set the following (quotes are important!):

r_multiGpu “0″ (If you use SLI or CrossFireX, set this to 1. If not, then make sure this is a 0)
r_multithreaded_device “1″ (Allows Black Ops to use more than 1 CPU for it’s workload).
cl_maxpackets “100″ (Less lag on laggy connections, like 3G modems, etc)
cl_maxfps “120″ (Allows a smoother gameplay experience by increasing the max frame rate the game will run at)
clips “30″ (Not sure what this does, but seems to have some positive effect)

Conclusion
Tweaking Black Ops is the key to getting better performance out of the game. While the in-game settings can be a little lacking in the tweaks department, there’s a heap of settings for advanced users to tweak in the configuration files. Of course, with Black Ops 2 on the horizon, the BO2 engine should have some new tweaks up it’s sleeve for maximum performance.

GainWard’s nVidia GeForce GT 440 is nothing special. By that, I mean, it’s pretty much a entry-level that can do some gaming, but as soon as you move into the games that require some pounding on your GPU, it falls apart, even when you pump out some more megahertz via overclocking tools. Let me explain.

I originally purchased this graphics card as I wanted to replace my ATI HD4850. How nVidia markets it’s cards is confusing, and I thought this would be a mid-range card since 440 is the beginning of the GT4xx series. As a general rule, I later discovered that in the GT 4xx family, that the 400 – 430 cards were entry-level, 440 – 470 were budget, and 480 – 500 were performance cards. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Still, the card itself would possibly be the equivalent of an ATI HD5450 – it uses a single slot PCIe x16 connection, and doesn’t require additional power as it’s bus powered. I guess this bus-powered design does limit it how much performance it can pump out, since my older ATI HD4850 requires a 6Pin connector. The fan and heatsink look pretty nice too.

Benchmarks
For the record: the PC used to test this is my custom-built AMD Gaming PC, which consists of a Phenom II X2 CPU clocked at 3.0Ghz, an ASUS M4N68-M V2 motherboard, 4GB of Corsair DDR3 Memory and 500GB WD Green SATA2 HDD, and a recycled HP IDE DVD Burner. Yes, I still use IDE. (Shush!)

Note: FPS means Frames Per Second in our review; not First Person Shooter.

The first game I tried was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It seemed to have potential, however, as soon as I finished the first chapters’ mini-mission (where you go through a few challenges to determine your game’s difficulty settings) and walked outside, the game’s smoothness became jumpy. During gameplay, the FPS was bobbing up and down between 15 to 30 FPS. If you stripped all the eye-candy and ran it bare, then you got a reasonable 3 – 10 FPS speed boost. Of course, it depends on the amount of activity on-screen. Going prone and crawling around while looking low kept the FPS high, but standing up and looking around brought the card to an average of around 25 FPS. Playable, but not your cup of tea.

At the stock clocks, Multiplayer was choppy, but when overclocked to 900Mhz Core (along with memory clock adjustments), the game was playable. However, the card became unstable, giving me 3 black screen and reboot events.

Call of Duty: Black Ops was the second game I tested. The game lagged like hell with the recommended defaults that Treyarch recommend when you click the OK button on the “Set optimal defaults?” dialog. So, I stripped all the eye candy away and went barebones. The result? At the most, around 15 FPS. Choppy, but the worst I got was 3FPS, which mainly happened when a person threw a Willy Pete smoke grenade and made a smoke screen in Multiplayer. I promptly became the Round-ending Killcam. Oh joy.

Lastly, I tested Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Again, with eye candy stripped, it was quite playable. The game engine is optimized to provide a decent experience, even on shitty graphics cards. There were parts of the game were the game was a little laggy, but hey, blame the GPU. I was unable to get a reading of the FPS, but it was better than Black Ops.

Overclocking
I wouldn’t recommend overclocking this card. While you can, it’s a matter of upping the Core GPU clock in conjunction with the RAM clock. Too high on either one and you’ll get nasty results, like pixel mispatches, corrupted display, etc. Shader Cores seem to be OK for overclocking. I was able to up the shader core from 1.6Ghz to 1.9Ghz without any ill effects, but I proceeded with caution. I used TechPowerUp’s GUITool which is a old alpha modding tool, but I was able to successfully get the card OverClocked. The worse result was that over 45,000 pixels mismatched when testing for stability – so it was a matter of trial and error.

I also used MSI’s Afterburner tool, but after a 30min burn-in and a good session on Modern Warfare online to test my custom clocks, the GT440 in my possession released the magic smoke. Yep – screen went blank, and the card stopped responding. A forced reboot resulted in the motherboard using the onboard video chip – the GeForce card, after a few reboots, was dead. So yeah, overclocker beware.

Conclusion
The card itself should provide a decent boost if you’re playing old games on integrated graphics. However, don’t expect miracles to happen with this budget card. One thing that the card has going for it is the fact it has 96 CUDA Cores, and if you need a card that has some CUDA cores for a CUDA-accelerated project; then this would be ideal. Still, with that all concluded, it’s not too shabby for the price I paid for it – $79 (incl. postage). Get it if you absolutely need a GPU but don’t intend to party hard.

Downside is that this new VPS costs more, and someone’s gotta pay the bills, however the performance of this VPS is better than our first VPS. I’m looking into using Flattr, which is a unique way of donating money to websites (like this one) which I can use in conjunction with our PayPal donations box. Another idea was to run some advertising (not AdChoices/Flash ads) that would be non-intrusive and related to Coburn’s Domain. This advertisement setup is not finalized, I wish to keep the site clear of ads.

Since we also use CloudFlare, we will try to move over to the new Tokyo-based VPS, so during this time, some parts of this site may be offline, and/or replaced with cached versions of the site. Don’t fret – we’ll be back to full capacity within a reasonable timeframe.

VPS Hosts have the dumbest of reasons to suspend VPS accounts. I mean, I’ve been using my VPS to run an IRC Network and also testing grounds for a new project. Our VPS, perrine.coburndomain.net, was frozen in ice this morning because it apparently was ‘spamming’. The one that I’m pointing the gun at, Exigent, the company that the VPS is hosted with gave a really blunt reason, quote:

Sending out SPAM.

Our VPS is monitored daily to ensure nothing malicious attacks it. It’s kept up to date with the latest software patches. However, this morning, after I was doing the rounds and checking a configuration file via SSH, the VPS got suspended.

A VPS means virtual private server. Think of it like a little server that we own, on a server that a company owns. We own the VPS – but not the “main” server. We’ve got our own servers that run in conjunction with other servers that make up the Coburn’s Domain network.

So, to put it simply, we got a door in our face – and we can’t pull files we need off the VPS until this matter gets resolved. I’ve already sent a support ticket flagged as urgent to clarify WHAT exactly triggered the automatic “you’re sending SPAM” suspension. It’s also been a good few hours. Phone support is broken and their support staff seem to be AFK, so they don’t have to put up with my rage.

I’m sure it’s an honest mistake and meant to flag someone else for spamming; but seriously, give me some decent warning next time. Geez.

We just spotted this earlier today. Apparently, it seems that rumors suggest that Nintendo may be considering making a interface for Android-powered devices to ‘interact’ (one way or another) with the Wii U, the console that is still under development. Other rumors suggest that the Wii U may run on Android itself, or just have some parts of Android mixed in with it all.

Again, these are all rumors – we don’t have anything to confirm that they are genuine, but given Nintendo’s ignorance of supporting other (mobile) gaming platforms other than it’s own, we wouldn’t be surprised if this rumor falls flat. At this moment in time, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Information in this article was sourced from Android Community.

I battled Corsair Force 3 Series SSD for some time, in which it turned out that the SSD had some odd quirks with the internal controller causing all sorts of random things to happen including complete system freezes, blue screens, etc. Having returned the SSD to my local PC store under warranty, I got notification yesterday that a replacement had arrived. To my surprise, the replacement was one of the faster Force GT Series – not the normal Force 3 series. Both SSDs are from the same family, however the GT series are optimized for speed with a better controller.

As you can see from the photo above, the SSD is red as red can be. The original one I had was “midnight black”. Both are the same capacity, 60GB. In this case, the SSD would contain a 64GB NAND Flash Chip, which would have 4GB for wear-leveling and cache, while 60GB is available for OS and application use.

So, let’s see how it performs:

Performance Test: Clone from HDD to SSD connected via USB
The Force GT SSD was connected in a USB SATA HDD enclosure, and Arconis TrueImage was booted from CD. I chose to clone the contents of my Lenovo G570′s 640GB HDD, which contained a OEM windows install plus drivers, to the SSD. After clicking next, next and finally, “Start”, the remaining time counter said 44 minutes.

However, that progress bar was rapidly filling – the counter kept clicking down and recalculating itself. In the end, it took just under 15 minutes – clocking in at 14 minutes and 37.8 seconds to finish the clone. That’s faster than installing Windows from a USB Flash Drive! Of course, the 480Mbps limitation of USB2 prevents the SSD from unleashing it’s full potiental, but if this was connected to a USB3 enclosure, then you’d have a seriously fast external SSD.

Boot-up Time Test
With our newly cloned SSD transplanted into the Lenovo laptop (out with the old and in with the new, as they say), the SSD was warm to the touch. The design of the SSD (the casing seems to be a mix of plastic and aluminum) helps prevent the SSD from cooking itself to death. We booted up the laptop, and Windows started.

The SSD took off like a rocket – the Windows bootup animation couldn’t even keep up with the speed of the drive. Within seconds, I was presented with my password logon prompt. After updating the Intel chipset drivers, more reboots were carried out to confirm it wasn’t a one-time fluke.

Thanks to Lenovo’s own boot-time checking tool, the SSD was booting Windows within 15 seconds – 13 seconds to be accurate – which beat the record of 45 seconds on the older 640GB HDD. SATA3 also provides additional speed benefits.

Final Thoughts
I’m seriously impressed at the speed so far. This drive is even better than the one I sent away for warranty, and it just screams. Benchmarks will come later, but if you’re looking for serious performance, hit up the Corsair Force 3 GT series SSD range. You may be paying more for your buck, but the additional cost results in absolute awesome performance – your OS and applications become like butter. It’s that quick.

My rank? Well, I’d have to give it a A. Better than my el-cheapo KingSpec 8GB SSD that’s in one of my older PCs, that’s for sure!

We don’t have much detail, but we do have some screenshots courtesy of GameFAQs, listed below. As you can see in the screenshots, the HUD gets some cosmetic changes and levels seem to be more interactive. Click them for a larger view.

Of course, this is just a tech demo, which could be regarded as an Alpha or early Beta build of the game.

Image Credit: GameFAQs.

CCleaner
Crap Cleaner, or just CCleaner for short, can be downloaded here. Forget about the professional or business edition, they don’t have any major benefits over the free version.
What CCleaner does is that it intelligently looks through your computer’s storage for junk files, and offers to clean them. These junk files are deleted, but your data is perfectly safe. Once installed (make sure you untick the Google Toolbar or Google Chrome offer while installing!), make sure you have the options ticked as shown, and then press “Run Cleaner”or just click “Analyse” if you want to be surprised at the amount of crap that’s on your system.

Windows XP users should also tick “Hotfix Uninstallers” to free up, in most cases, a few gigs worth of installed patches and updates backup files.

CCleaner can also clean up your Windows Registry. Simply click the “Registry” tab in CCleaner’s main interface. Make sure you backup the registry before you apply any fixes it recommends.

MyDefrag (formerly known as JKDefrag)
Here’s a fact: One of the major reasons your operating system is slow is caused by the OS having to shift data around while trying to look for things – not your hardware! On a HDD, this is called fragmentation, and can cause excess drive wear and tear on your HDD’s internal motors as well as apps taking longer to load. On a SSD, fragmentation isn’t much of a problem, due to the NAND flash chips being super-fast when reading data.
Enter MyDefrag, which can be downloaded here. When installed (and it’s only a few MB), you’ll be presented with a screen, like the following:

Make sure you close all running applications – this includes Instant Messengers, Web Browsers, Steam/Origin, any games you may have running, etc as failure to do so will result in Defragmentation Issues and unmovable files. MyDefrag may take some time, so why not go and walk the dog while it does it’s job. Don’t run CCleaner while MyDefrag is running either!

If it’s your first defrag, do the “System Disk Monthly” task, and only select your system partition/drive. Once that is done, if you have a Data partition/drive, run MyDefrag again, but this time, use “Data Disk Monthly” on only your Data drive(s)/partition(s).

Windows ChkDsk
ChkDsk, which means ‘Check Disk’, is a tool that ensures your HDDs are healthy. To run ChkDsk, simply open up “My Computer” or “Computer”, right-click on your System Drive or whatever drive you want to check, choose “Properties”, then click the “Tools” tab, and finally, “Check Now…”. The screenshot shows the location of ChkDsk on Windows 7.

If ChkDsk can’t check the disk, it’ll ask you to schedule a boot-time disk check. Simply allow it, and next time you reboot, ChkDsk will run before Windows is fully booted. This ensures your filesystem is in good shape – and it does a damn good job fixing NTFS errors, especially on external USB-powered HDDs – mine had a corrupted NTFS filesystem and it repaired every single corrupted file.

These are only some methods you can do to make your computer faster. Remember, to get the boost that method provides, you need to reboot after you’ve done the method listed above. Did this guide help you? Let us know in the comments!

Let’s face it. When your tablet’s manufacturer updates the WiFi-only version of a tablet generation (we’re talking about the A50x series) to ICS, the 3G Models apparently get overlooked.

Not anymore, thanks to the bright sparks that are XDA-Developers, shchers has completed his first build of ICS for the A501 Iconia Tab.

However, installing this little gem is not for the newcomers – you will need to follow instuctions on installing a unlocked patched bootloader to enable ICS booting and installing a modified ClockworkMod recovery before attempting to install this.

Still reading this and wanting to give it a shot? Unleash your hacking skills and follow the full guide here in nice, clean english.

Seriously though, it begs the question:
ACER, Y U NO MAKE ICS UPDATE FOR 3G ICONIA TAB OWNERS?!
For now, it’ll just have to do. :)